In-Store: Translations in Conversation w/ Emma Ramadan and Jonathan Woollen

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Join us for a conversation featuring the translators of two brand-new novels in translation: Self-Worth, written by Emma Tholozan, trans. Emma Ramadan, and Superstars, written Ann Scott, trans. Jonathan Woollen.

SELF-WORTH:

True love or easy money—which would you choose?

Fresh out of grad school with her masters in philosophy, Anna is shocked when a career counselor tells her she has “no special skills.” Desperate for work and financial independence, she accepts a thankless gig working for a TV talk show. She might be making minimum wage, but at least she has her beloved boyfriend Lulu, the love of her life, to come home to at night.

But one day Lulu runs to the bathroom and starts throwing up cash—thousands of euros in just a few days—hurtling the twentysomething couple into unforeseen wealth. Having spent their lives proudly rejecting consumer society, they suddenly find themselves rich, and Anna is loving every minute of it: she gets a designer bag, they vacation in Tahiti, they throw wild parties in their new luxury apartment.

As Anna grows accustomed to living large, Lulu’s health suffers, and she wonders: What would be worse, losing him or losing the money?

In Self-Worth French debut novelist Emma Tholozan delivers a raw, brutally funny portrait of a generation without ideals.

SUPERSTARS:

One of the premier French cult novels of the last thirty years, a tender and combative portrait of Paris’s queer rave scene in the 90s — for fans of Virginie Despentes and Gary Indiana.

Louise is a woman in her early thirties with a record contract, colorful roommates, and a passionate, volatile relationship with the lesbian community around her. She used to be part of the French rock scene, having dated and collaborated with a man named Nikki who was a crucial figure in that milieu. But she has been out of that world for years, having switched from rock to rave culture and, concurrently, having started to date chiefly women. Her longest and most combative relationship in this scene has been with Alex, another woman who has established herself as a DJ and has recently started seeing a much younger woman named Inès.

One day, Louise receives a life-changing advance from a record label to produce her own electronic music. She struggles to handle the responsibility of professionalizing her lifestyle, one suffused with the omnidirectional drama of the women in her circle, and with her own equivocations about her role in it. They bar-crawl, watch MTV, go to each other’s sets, hook up, and do copious drugs.

Tension builds as Louise finds herself pulled toward multiple possible paths: forward in her career in the techno world; backward toward rock’n’roll, Nikki, and the life he represents; toward Alex again; and toward Inès, leading to a dangerous and ultimately devastating affair. Ann Scott portrays the Paris underground in all its beauty, ugliness, and pulpy grandeur, with the caustic voice of a born punk struggling to conform to the standards of a new, hungry world of anticonformists.

Emma Ramadan is an educator and literary translator from French. She was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying, and has also received the Albertine Prize, two NEA Fellowships, and a Fulbright. Her other translations include Maud Ventura’s My Husband, Anne Garréta’s Sphinx, and Virginie Despentes’s Pretty Things. Emma lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Jonathan Woollen is a French-to-English translator originally from North Carolina, currently based in Queens, NY, and working in publishing. His translation of Ann Scott’s novel Superstars came out in April from Astra House, and his other translations of authors including Régis Jauffret and David Diop have run at outlets like Asymptote and Electric Literature.

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